Which is something I haven't done in eleven months either.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Spur
We leave Sharp a few minutes before four in the morning.
Dakota’s in the passenger seat of my Ford because I'm not letting her drive her own truck to a qualifier with a stalker note in her saddle bag and another one I haven't seen yet probably waiting for her somewhere on the road.
Jaeger is in her trailer hitched to the back and her gear is in the bed under a tarp.
Her phone is in her lap, screen down.
She's been quiet since I pulled up to her cabin at three forty-five and found her on the porch with two travel mugs and a duffel.
She handed me one of the mugs without saying a damn thing.
The first hour of the drive is dark and silent.
The county roads west of Sharp are nothing but barbed wire and sleep, and the only thing in the headlights is the white line and the occasional reflective marker that shows up the way a possum's eyes show up in November.
Country radio low. She has it on a station out of San Angelo because she likes the morning DJ.
I've never asked her how she knows the DJ on a station I've never tuned into in my life. I don't ask now.
At the county line she sets her phone face-down on the dash. "Spur?"
"Yeah."
"Don't do the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you don't talk for four hours and then I'm supposed to thank you for not talking."
A small sound comes out of me that isn't a laugh but isn't not one either. "Okay."
"Okay."
She doesn't say anything else. Neither do I.
The rest of the four hours we don't speak.
But it's not the silence she warned me against.
It's the silence of two people saving their breath for what's coming.
* * *
The Tri-State Fair grounds in Stephenville smell the way every rodeo grounds in Texas smells.
Manure. Diesel. Funnel cake grease that hasn't been turned on yet but soaks into the structure of the place.
The dust they spray on the arena floor between events to keep it down.
A Coors banner that's been hanging for decades and somehow looks new.
The PA tower with a man inside it adjusting a mic at seven in the morning.
